The Goog is boasting that more than 90 million people have signed up for Google+. Those are pretty impressive numbers. I mean, if you had 90 million people at your disposal, you could do anything. You’d rule the Internet. Except there’s one little problem: No one is using the site.The Wall Street Journal has the hard, unfiltered truth: According to comScore numbers, users spent an average of 3 minutes on G+ in the entire month of January. Facebook users spent 405 minutes, or nearly 7 hours, on the site. People managed to find 17 minutes to spare to add connections on LinkedIn. Hell, even MySpace users — many of whom are probably ghost accounts — surfed for eight minutes over the month. Three minutes, Google+? You have got to be kidding me.The sad thing is, anecdotally, you’d probably agree with the stats. Outside of taking advantage of Plus’ amazing Hangout feature, which lets you videoconference (or video-party, as the case may be) with up to 10 different people, I’ve hardly used the site. I refuse to understate how awesome Hangout is — you can even jam out to YouTube videos with the group — but other than that, the site doesn’t offer anything enticing that isn’t to be found elsewhere.The Circles thing is a cool idea, but they’re not exactly a large enough privacy shift to defeat Facebook, especially considering the latter has already made moves to implement the basic premise of selectively sharing your life to set groups. Plus, there’s a question of whether Circles is even relevant; those savvy enough to recognize its utility are likely to also be of the ilk who either already censor their sharing online, or accept that everything they post is everywhere forever, and just don’t care.“Nobody wants another social network right now,” Brian Solis, a social media analyst at Altimeter Group, is quoted as saying by the WSJ. That’s a common lament / defense of Google+ that people seem to share to soften the blow of its failure, as if saying ‘Sorry Google, you tried hard and it’s a cool network, but I’m just too busy right now.’But the argument that users don’t want any more social networks is false. Those same comScore numbers show that users spent a whopping 89 minutes last month on Pinterest, more than four times that of even Twitter users. So it’s not that users don’t have any free time for more social networks. They just won’t use ones that waste it.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter.
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